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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24349042">and if you court this disaster</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/findingkairos/pseuds/cosmogony'>cosmogony (findingkairos)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>we were faster on our feet [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Final Fantasy XV, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Child Soldiers, Cor Leonis Whump, Discussion of war, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Loyalty, Master of Death Harry Potter, Self-Doubt, a pinch of comfort, local fifteen year old Cor Leonis curses a lot</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 08:28:27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,113</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24349042</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/findingkairos/pseuds/cosmogony</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>When Cor Leonis is thrown out of King Mors’s Crownsguard and goes off to the Tempering Grounds to prove himself, he meets a scruffy teenager with Lucis Caelum features and magic. He proceeds to freak out.</p><p>Harry just wants to retire in peace at the prime old age of eighteen, thank you.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Harry Potter &amp; Cor Leonis, Harry Potter &amp; Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>we were faster on our feet [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1757932</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>50</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>722</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. blademaster, lionheart, deathseeker</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>(<i>the things you left unsaid</i> — weigh my heart, please don’t find me wanting)</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The fight with the First Shield was the hardest that Cor had ever fought. Not even the front lines of the war had been this demanding.</p><p>But meeting the kid under Gilgamesh’s protection was even harder. For one thing, the kid used <em>magic</em> – which, as far as Cor knew, only the royal bloodlines of Lucis Caelum and Nox Fleuret could do. For another, the kid looked like a starvation victim, if not a war orphan.</p><p>The way he glared daggers and lounged beneath Gilgamesh’s shadow was telling. Cor was fifteen himself and armed with only a sword. The kid had no non-magical weapons other than a stick – no more than a foot long and a twig, really, than a stick – but whenever Cor startled him, there was a sudden pressure that pressed against his ribs and kept his lungs from expanding.</p><p>“I’m eighteen,” the kid snapped when Cor called him kid one too many times.</p><p>“Bullshit,” Cor said, mostly on reflex, and was still too shocked to dodge the rock thrown at his head.</p><p>The kid – Harry, he’d insisted on being called – was too scrawny, too short, to be Cor’s elder by three years. But there was a glint to his eye and an awareness of where Cor was relative to him. He flinched whenever Cor moved too fast or with a weapon in hand.</p><p>But maybe the most telling was the way Gilgamesh treated him – with care, but with respect. He spoke of tactics and logistics with Harry as though he were a general, not an eighteen-year-old in scruffy jeans living out of a backpack. He kept the sparring well away from his corner of the Tempering Grounds when he deigned to train Cor.</p><p>He glared at Cor when he couldn’t keep his eyes away from the scars on Harry’s back, raw and fresh. Some of them were too clean to be from a fight. Some of them looked too deliberate.</p><p>So maybe Harry really was a victim of the war with Niflheim. It still didn’t explain the magic.</p><p>“I’m not supposed to be here,” was all he said when Cor brought it up with him. There was a wry twist to his smile and a harsh edge to his stare when he said it.</p><p>Cor glanced at Gilgamesh, but the First Shield was honing his sword. No help from that quarter, but neither did he look like he would run Cor through for pressing the question. “Then where are you supposed to be?”</p><p>Harry opened his mouth. Paused. Looked disgruntled and closed it.</p><p>“I have things to do back home,” he said, but he sounded unsure.</p><p>King Mors had thrown him out of the Citadel, but Cor still texted Prince Regis’s Advisor. Maybe if he brought a long-lost relation back he’d be accepted back into the Retinue. “May I ask what things?”</p><p>Harry snorted and returned to digging through his backpack. “Retirement, for one.”</p><p>Retirement?</p><p>“You’re eighteen,” Cor pointed out, just in case Harry had missed that detail or he’d been told the wrong number, but he was waved off without even a glance in his direction.</p><p>“Trust me, after the war? I’m going to retire and become a hermit.”</p><p>Gilgamesh threw a training sword at Cor before he could ask any more questions.</p><p>It didn’t stop him from seeking answers, which came slowly over the course of many days.</p><p>Harry had fought in a war – not in the one against Niflheim, but against another madman terrorist. He had won the war. He had been on his way home when someone had swept him away and dumped him off in front of a startled Gilgamesh.</p><p>He knew who was responsible for the scenic change, Cor could tell. Not in so many words, because Harry was unnervingly good at hiding his own tells, but Cor had grown up an orphan and a fighting prodigy, and he could recognize when someone was avoiding the question.</p><p>Not that it mattered. Even Gilgamesh agreed that Harry had the blood of the Lucis Caelum running through his veins, though he was reluctant to agree with Cor on <em>anything</em>. But what could they do about it?</p><p>Nothing, apparently, because after one particularly grueling session with Gilgamesh, Cor woke up to Harry speaking with a figure wreathed in smoke.</p><p>“That’s ridiculous,” he was saying. Cor had scrambled to his feet in attention before he realized what he was doing. Harry sounded like a meld of his field commander and Prince Regis, that no-nonsense tone combined with the utterly confident. “How did you even bring me here anyway?”</p><p>DEATH IS UNIVERSAL, the figure said, and somehow conveyed the emotion of a shrug without actually shrugging. WHY, IS IT NOT TO YOUR LIKING?</p><p>“I was rather looking forward to a retirement at a nice Scottish villa,” Harry bit out, and ran a hand through his hair. The hell was a Scottish villa? Was it a type of architecture style? Weskham had always been on his ass to study so Cor would be more than just a grunt.</p><p>MY DEAR HARRY. The figure sounded almost fond. It did nothing to bely the wispy quality to its voice, nor the faint ringing left in Cor’s ears in the wake of its words. YOU KNOW THERE IS NO REST FOR US.</p><p>“What do you mean?” Cor asked before he could think more of it and dug in his heels when both whirled on him. His katana probably wouldn’t do shit against a form that was mostly smoke, but he drew it anyway. “Who are you?”</p><p>OH, YOU CAN HEAR ME? AND SEE ME. The figure leaned in and Cor flinched back on reflex. There was nothing but shadow in its hood, but where a man might have had eyes it had white fire. VERY INTERESTING. YOU MUST HAVE SEEN MY WORK MANY TIMES BEFORE.</p><p>Cor ran it through with his blade. It laughed in his face and turned into mist that rushed past him, a rush of cold and chill of death that he hadn’t felt since he’d left the war front. It made him cough, his lungs burning as though he were starved of oxygen, never mind the fact he was nowhere near water and he was no longer eight years old.</p><p>“Don’t be mean,” Harry was saying when Cor had control over his hacking. “But why here? If you’re not going to let me sleep then what’s so special about this place?”</p><p>YOU, MY DEAR, ARE NOT JUST THE HEIR OF THE MOST ANCIENT AND NOBLE HOUSE OF BLACK, Death said, because Cor had danced with it enough to recognize it when it fucked with his lungs.</p><p>Bingo. “Fucking knew it,” Cor muttered, and spat on the Tempering Grounds. He ignored the grumble from Gilgamesh and sucked on his teeth to try and get rid of the taste of blood. “How close of a relation?”</p><p>COUSINS AT LEAST. YOU ARE COR LEONIS, YES? When Cor straightened to look Death in the eye, it did not look away. YOU HAVE SENT MANY A SOUL MY WAY.</p><p>“For good reason,” he replied, and ignored Harry cursing in some foreign tongue under his breath. “Why are you here?”</p><p>BECAUSE SOMEONE HAS BEEN DRAGGING THEIR FEET. Death tilted its head at Harry, whose scowl was so much like Reggie’s that Cor’s breath stuttered in his throat. A TUMULOTOUS TIME YOUR REALM MIGHT BE IN, BUT DEAR HARRY COULD USE AN…ESCAPE, IF YOU WILL, FROM BEING THE SAVIOR OF HIS WORLD.</p><p>“So you bring him to one that would claim him as royalty.” Cor could almost understand, if in a sideways and backwards way. Being royalty would afford him comfort, security, respect. Not a bad retirement for someone who Death spoke fondly of.</p><p>Harry seemed to realize it too because he bit off his last word, something that sounded lilting to Cor’s ears, and sighed. “Really? Death? That’s the reason why?”</p><p>ALSO BECAUSE THERE IS SOMEONE HERE WHO HAS BEEN ESCAPING ME. There was definite amusement in Death’s voice now, which was just bizarre. YOU’VE DONE IT ONCE.</p><p>“As long as I don’t have to die again.”</p><p>This time Cor did choke, and his only vindication was that even Gilgamesh looked stunned. Who the fuck had fucked up so bad that an eighteen-year-old of royal blood had died?</p><p>NO DYING NECESSARY. Death cast a look at Gilgamesh, who shifted on his feet. FOR YOU, ANYWAY. I WILL SEE THE REST IN TIME.</p><p>“As it should be.” Harry grimaced, and Cor checked over his shoulder on instinct to see whatever had upset him before he stopped himself. “Well. If that’s <em>all</em>, Death.”</p><p>UNTIL LATER, Death replied, and then was gone.</p><p>Cor opened his mouth. Gilgamesh whacked him upside the head. Cor closed his mouth. Harry staunchly ignored them both and scrubbed both hands over his face, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes. It was such a Regis thing to do that for a moment Cor couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t see beyond the fact that Regis was older than Harry by only two years, but look how much older the latter looked.</p><p>The three-year age difference between himself and Harry might as well be thirty years.</p><p>“Whatever happens,” Harry said at last into his palms, “I’m not royalty.”</p><p>Cor had to bite down on the automatic <em>Who the hell was your Shield? Clearly they weren’t doing their job</em>, but Gilgamesh gave him a stern look, and damn.</p><p>Forget proving himself good enough to return to Regis’s Retinue; apparently Cor had <em>another</em> Lucis Caelum to look after, even if they didn’t want him to.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. that which is mine to give</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Who knew? Maybe the third time would be the charm and this one would actually let him stay.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Talking to Harry was like pulling teeth, and Cor should know; Regis had made him go to the dentist when he was thirteen. Cor still didn’t understand why it was important that he hadn’t gone to the dentist before then, but he remembered the drill and the depressor and the other myriad of metallic objects that the dentist stuck in his mouth and that he didn’t like, and–</p><p>So. It was like pulling teeth. It didn’t mean that Cor shouldn’t or couldn’t do it, mostly because if he was going to be protecting a Lucis Caelum then he needed to know what potential enemies might be coming after their heads. The Tempering Grounds were watched over by Gilgamesh, but surely Harry would want to move beyond its bounds sooner rather than later.</p><p>Who knew? Maybe the third time would be the charm and this one would actually let him stay.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“Wanna talk about it?”</p><p>Harry shot him a dirty glare and went back to his silent complicated stick-waving. Cor dug in his heels and reached for guard duty-level patience.</p><p>It paid off when Harry breathed harshly through his nose and said, “No.”</p><p>What was it that Weskham always said? Life was a give and take? Maybe Cor needed to go first, make sure Harry didn’t see him as a threat.</p><p>“I’m a soldier of Lucis,” Cor said.</p><p>Harry didn’t even look up when he replied, “Bullshit. You can’t be any older than thirteen.”</p><p>“I’m fifteen, actually,” Cor shot back, and only just barely refrained from swinging. Three months since he’d gotten kicked out of the Citadel and he still couldn’t keep a lid on his temper. Keep it together, Leonis, don’t fuck this up. “But I’m a soldier. That’s why I’m here, training with Gilgamesh. He’s the First Shield; he’ll make me better.”</p><p>He’ll make me good enough, he didn’t say, but evidently Harry heard something because he did look up this time. His hair was a mess and he had green eyes, but that was a glare right out of court leveled at him. Cor did not straighten under it because he was already ramrod field-muster straight, staring into the middle distance over Harry’s shoulder.</p><p>“I’ve fought on the front,” he told Harry. “So I get it. Whatever you saw, however bad your war was, I can take it.”</p><p>“You shouldn’t have had to,” the man hissed, and no. That was the last straw.</p><p>“Where else was there for me to go? The war was on our doorstep and people were dying, they were <em>razing towns</em> and the daemons kept hunting in the night and it was fight or die.”</p><p>Distantly Cor realized that he had lunged forward, hands balled, not far or quick enough to be an attack but definitely breaking out of parade rest. Look at you, Leonis, a pathetic soldier as always. You think you’re good enough to be Crownsguard? You think you’re good enough to serve the Royal Family? You’re just street trash they picked up and entertained.</p><p>Harry turned on him and Cor flinched back, arms coming up to protect his head, turning so that his shoulder was presented first instead of his ribs and vulnerable stomach. He gritted his teeth and waited.</p><p>And waited.</p><p>The blow never came.</p><p>When he plucked up the courage and managed to uncoil himself from where he’d stood trembling like a raw recruit, Harry was on the other side of the clearing. His face was blank, but the eyes–</p><p>Regis’s temper had always been in the eyes too. Looked like that ran in the blood.</p><p>“I fought,” Harry whispered, voice blank and terrible, “so that those younger than me didn’t have to. I didn’t always succeed, but damn it, I tried.”</p><p>Cor had to swallow hard and pull himself together. “You succeeded. Or was the ‘winning the war’ bit a lie?”</p><p>Harry blinked, sudden and cat-like. Most of the pressure on Cor’s ribs lifted away. The rest lingered, coiled like the snake-woman creature thing that the veterans liked to weave nightmare-tales about.</p><p>“We won,” Harry said, and he sounded wondrous. Cor could sympathize. It probably felt like a dream still, if he’d fought in it for years like he’d described.</p><p>“And you?”</p><p>“Me what?” Cor asked, trying to shove down the heart that leapt up to his throat.</p><p>“That’s not all of it,” Harry clarified, and not for the first time Cor cursed the perceptiveness of the Lucis Caelum.</p><p>Give and take, Weskham had said.</p><p>Beneath his tongue were words he’d never said to King Mors, to Regis, to Cid or Weskham or Clarus, even if they knew it because it was in his personnel file. Carefully he pulled them out and set them against the back of his teeth. Once he was sure that they would come out even he whispered, “When I was eight my grandfather tried to drown me.”</p><p>Harry’s head whipped around like someone had shot him. “It’s fine,” Cor told those wide eyes, and breathed in deeply to remind himself he could. It almost worked. “It’s been years. Everything’s fine.”</p><p>“Everything’s fine,” Harry repeated quietly, but it didn’t sound mocking. It sounded – like a mantra. A sentiment that he was trying to hold onto.</p><p>Then Harry beckoned, and Cor stepped forward as though they were in the Citadel and its politics and not just in the wilds of Taelpar Crag, and he sat down by the fire and listened when Harry told him, this time in detail, of the War Beyond The Veil.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Cor had not brought camping equipment nor a sleeping bag, because he had anticipated Gilgamesh’s Trial to be a one-and-done thing where he either lived or died, and not something that would drag on into weeks and months of training. He had slept beneath the stars under the watchful eye of the First Shield, his back against the canyon wall, his sword sheathed and leaning against his shoulder.</p><p>That night Harry provided him with hearth and roof, and Cor accepted it with trembling hands.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Cor had anticipated being the one to protect the Lucis Caelum line from harm. He knew his place; he was a refugee, an orphan, a genius soldier boy, yes, but in the end he was nobody special. Young men of his talent were a dime a dozen in the Crownsguard, and their numbers grew by the day while the war went on.</p><p>Apparently, Harry did not see it that way.</p><p>“They <em>cast you out</em>.” Harry had drawn himself up, as incandescent in his rage – and wouldn’t Weskham be proud of him using the big words now – as any Lucis Caelum whom Cor had ever seen. “You’re fifteen and you were in their care and they cast you out.”</p><p>War general, Cor remembered. Men had no doubt been in Harry’s care – perhaps even people older than the both of them – and Regis himself had proven again and again that the mark of a leader was that they took care of their people. Cor probably hadn’t done anything to endear the Lucis Caelums to Harry, now that he thought about it.</p><p>In this moment, Harry standing tall and not looming over him, not even now when he had every right to, hair standing with static electricity and the promise of vengeance in the glow to his eyes, Cor couldn’t care less.</p><p>“They gave me an honorable discharge,” Cor pointed out, because King Mors didn’t have to do that. He’d served in Regis’s Retinue and he’d been a bodyguard for the King both, but he was just a Private in the Crownsguard and a warm body on the frontlines.</p><p>Well. Had been, now. Cor Leonis was as civilian as the next fifteen-year-old Lucian brat, at least according to military record.</p><p>“An <em>honorable discharge</em> for a <em>child soldier</em>,” Harry seethed. Cor knew now, after that late-night conversation that he didn’t mean child soldier as a derogatory term as some in the Guard had. Just an acknowledgement of his youth and his past, the same way Harry and his army had been youthful and fighting.</p><p><em>Neither of us should have had to fight</em>, Harry had said into the fire last night. Cor agreed that Harry should not have had to if any of those who’d supposed to have been his Retinue had been worth their salt, but he didn’t agree with the rest of the sentiment.</p><p>And yet the tightness in his chest had nothing to do with the magical pressure Harry was capable of leveling when he wanted to make a point.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Gilgamesh grunted. “Your loyalties should not be divided. You can only have one liege.”</p><p>Cor swore and swung up. His katana struck nothing but air; Gilgamesh was too fast. Still, it was embarrassing to be startled into violence.</p><p>“And if you wish to stay by his side,” the spirit added dryly, “you’ll need to break that bad habit.”</p><p>“Fuck off,” Cor hissed at him, also out of habit, and took the hint to put his katana away. “You can’t tell me what to do.”</p><p>Gilgamesh had no eyebrows to raise behind that impassive mask, but the feeling of him doing so was honed to the point of being its own weapon. Cor hissed at him again and backed away and ducked when the spirit threw his blade at his head.</p><p>“These are the Tempering Grounds, my boy,” Gilgamesh said almost kindly, but Cor wasn’t fooled for a minute. He was vindicated when Gilgamesh summoned his weapon to hand and took up a sparring stance, the same way he started all of their training sessions. “I tell you what to do when you’re here.”</p><p>Of course the spirit had to have the last word, Cor thought to himself later, panting and splayed on the dusty ground and squinting against the noon blue sky. Of fucking course.</p><p>But what was new was that when Cor was slowly trying to remember what it felt like to feel his fingers again, Harry was leaning over him, his black scruffy hair and magic-green eyes blocking out the sun.</p><p>“Harry,” Cor wheezed, and tried to scramble up. A firm hand on his shoulder had him continue his absolutely disrespectful sprawl on the ground, you think you’re good enough boy? When you can’t even be good enough to address your betters the way they deserve–</p><p>The wash of magic over him was like a splash of water to the face. Cor sputtered beneath it and dragged in a breath, and then another one when it came too easily without the pain of the bruises and cracked ribs that Gilgamesh had beaten into him for his incompetence.</p><p>“You can take it slow,” Harry told him while Cor flexed his fingers and then his toes, marveling at the fact that his clothes were mending by themselves, as neatly and as wholly as his skin. “There’s no rush.”</p><p>Lucis Caelum magic was unmistakable. How potent must it be that Harry didn’t even need a conduit like potions or elixirs?</p><p>“The war isn’t over for us.” Cor’s sword was halfway across the clearing, where it had skittered to the ground after Gilgamesh had disarmed him for hand-to-hand combat. He dug his fingernails into empty palms and was startled into relaxing them when Harry took Cor’s hands in his. “I need to get back to the front.”</p><p>He could not meet Harry’s eyes, but he could see the man’s expression in his peripheral vision all the same. Weariness and acceptance and a resigned sort of anger. Harry did not say that he was too young, or that it was no longer his fight, or that they did not need him.</p><p>He said, “They don’t deserve you,” and Cor had to bite his tongue and use all the tricks in the book that he knew to keep his emotions where they were supposed to be: beneath the skin.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>But perhaps that conversation was the tipping point, the one that convinced Harry that he could not stay here in the Tempering Grounds in the sanctuary of Gilgamesh’s shadow, because the next day he was packing up his camp as meager as it was and getting ready to depart.</p><p>Cor watched him with sweaty palms, the panic in his chest slow and steady like the inevitable tide. He had to do this before he left, because once they were out of the bounds of Taelpar Crag who knew where Harry would go?</p><p>He waited until Harry had turned away from his conversation with Gilgamesh, his expression contemplative afterwards, not annoyed. That was good, Harry would be more inclined to listen to him until the end at least instead of denying him that outright.</p><p>Cor had lived through a lot of things but he didn’t think he could handle the judgmental stare a third time. Not when King Mors had permanently relieved him from his duty, and not when Prince Regis in his well-meant mercy had dismissed him from the war front and stripped away the only thing that Cor was good for.</p><p>“Harry,” Gilgamesh said when they were done, and inclined his head in Cor’s direction. He had only a moment to breathe out in relief – to gather up the courage along with the First Shield’s tacit blessing – before he was kneeling with his unsheathed blade and looking up at Harry.</p><p>Harry, whose eyes had gone wide behind those wide-rimmed glasses of his.</p><p>The words were ritual, and thank the Six for that, because Cor didn’t think he could get an original oath off his tongue and into the air between them if his life depended on it. He still stumbled over the beginning. “I, Cor Leonis, do hereby swear that I will shield your back and keep your counsel, to stand with you through fair and foul weather, to give my life to maintain your life, as a member of your Retinue.”</p><p>Cor dared to look up, and ah, there was the royal bearing. Shock had drained out of Harry’s face and grim assurance replaced it, and yes. Here was a Lucis Caelum in truth, he knew what it was that Cor was promising. Perhaps Gilgamesh, or maybe Death, had filled him in while Cor was sleeping.</p><p>And yet all he said was, “I will accept on one condition.”</p><p>Those were not the ritual words in return from a Lucis Caelum to a member of their Retinue, but then again, the only ritual about this was what Cor had taken into it. He swallowed hard and waited for the catch.</p><p>“Try again when you’re eighteen,” Harry said at last, voice deliberately light.</p><p>Cor couldn’t breathe. “And until then?”</p><p>“You’re in my care,” the third Lucis Caelum said, and that was the exact opposite of the way of things, but it wasn’t a rejection, it wasn’t laughter, it wasn’t being told that he wasn’t good enough.</p><p>Cor could wait three years. That was the easy part. But all he said was, “Alright,” and with his sword in one hand he grasped Harry’s in the other and let his new lord pull him up.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Harry: I’ve had this idiot child for all of a week but if anything happens to him I’ll kill everyone in the room, and then call Death to finish the job.</p><p>Story will be continued in the series <i>we were faster on our feet</i>, because apparently this muse is virulent.</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This is pure self indulgence, but now I have images of Harry Potter, the war hero and general of a guerilla war that tore apart entire societies complete with people dying on both sides and not just these weird tin can men, looking at this mess of a war and thinking: <i>All you gotta do is take out the enemy commander.</i></p><div class="center">
  <p>***</p>
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